Dan Bites

Yes, I do bake (get baked) on occasion. When I do, it’s usually nothing special. I don’t have enough baking experience to really screw around with the basics so I stick to recipes pretty closely. I did, however, alter the basic chocolate chip cookie this weekend. The results were fantastic! What I did was added some kinako.

Kinako is flour made from toasted soybeans. It’s extremely fine and has a subtle nutty taste, like a mild peanut. When baking with it you can replace some of the all-purpose flour in a recipe and end up with delicious results.

I started by mixing a half cup of room temperature butter with a quarter cup of cane sugar and a half cup of brown sugar until light and fluffy. Well, as light and fluffy as butter and sugar can get. My mixing bowl isn’t that large, so I always have to tape some newspaper together and build a wall around it to keep the sugar from flying everywhere. Yuki laughs at me, but not just because of that.

In a small bowl I scrambled an egg with a half teaspoon of vanilla extract and then beat that into the butter and sugar mixture. Then, in another bowl, I sifted together one cup of all-purpose flour, a half cup of kinako, a half teaspoon of baking soda, and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Once that was sifted it got mixed into the butter, sugar, and now egg mixture. After I had a thoroughly mixed together dough I mixed in a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips.

I put big blobs of the dough on a greased baking sheet and baked at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes. It was really hard to let them cool though, I just wanted to dive headfirst into those things!

The additions of kinako really does add a peanuty flavor. It’s not quite as strong as the peanut, so it doesn’t overpower the vanilla or chocolate. If cooked properly, it’ll be just as soft in the middle as a good chocolate chip cookie should be. The only problem is that now Yuki wants me to make them every week! I’m going to get fat!